Transcript of "The Shape of Alpha"

3.
“The problems they have with labeling and handling contested
categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the
world began. Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act. [...]
would love to avoid those problems if they could – who needs
the tsouris? — but they canʼt. No one gets cataloging “right” in
any perfect sense, and no algorithm returns the “correct”
results. We know that, because we see it every day, in every
large-scale system we use. No set of labels or algorithms solves
anything once and for all; any working system for showing data
to the user is a bag of optimizations and tradeoffs that are a lot
worse than some Platonic ideal, but a lot better than nothing.”
Clay Shirky